Jesus fucking Christ... I always knew this thing was dumb, but I was trying to think of similarly sized trains for a good comparison. I live near Atlanta. Our local airport Hartsfield-Jackson is the busiest airport by passenger count. There is a train called the Plane Train that connects the terminals together. According to that page it has 2.8 miles of track which is similar to the LVCC Loop's 2.2. The Plane Train carried "more than 250,000 people per day" (article from 2018, btw). The LVCC Loop has "demonstrated peak capacity of over 4,500 passengers per hour, and over 32,000 passengers per day." The Plane Train uses 11 four-car trains during peak hours. The LVCC Loop uses 70 cars. Even if you wanted to make a weird comparison and say "but it's not 88 cars" that wouldn't make up for the 7.8x capacity of the Plane Train lol. Plus, each car is driven by a human. The trains are autonomous. I assume there may be someone monitoring it from some control area, but still.

PLUS! It's not like The Plane Train is some crazy high tech solution! It was first made in 1980. I remember in pre 9/11 days riding it to the terminal to see off family members as they left for flights. Not much has changed about it. People don't get on it and think "wow this is so cool." It just works!

Elon Musk could not beat a simple train system in an airport built in the 1980s.

I thought the point was solving traffic. Not making money. Even the headline contradicts itself.

The important thing is that it's making $75 million a year, not that it's profitable or that it's efficient.

The .com "Revenue is value" bullshit has persisted and it sucks.

That $75 million figure made my bullshit detector start to squawk, so I did the math. The web site says it has a capacity of 4,400 visitors per hour, and assuming $3.75 per ride (if nobody gets the daily pass for $5), it only has to operate at maximum capacity all hours of the day and night, 24/7, for 6 months to bring in that amount of revenue.

So if the profit margin is 50%, the Vegas Loop can make $75 million in a year of continuous operation at 100% capacity. Seems legit. /s

It's a great American success because instead of being good at what it needs to do, it is good at making money for a rich person.

We shouldn't even bother to compare, the loop thing in Las Vegas is not a transport system, it's an amusement ride.

It made him money but did not fix traffic lol

Sure bud, 75 million a year.

Let's be super generous and say this thing operates 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. And let's say we're talking about turnover, not profit when saying it "makes" 75 million a year. And let's say they do a 100 trips an hour all day long. That would mean a single trip would cost over $85. Yeah right, in your dreams buddy.

Also I haven't really looked into this Vegas Loop thing until now, and the tweet was right, it only connects a convention center and a hotel LOL

Elon is grafting as per usual, it’s government funded:

TBC doesn’t generate revenue from charging passengers (the rides are free)… Only LVCVA provided a substantive reply, and none addressed the question of capacity, nor the outstanding questions about children or passengers with mobility issues.

For instance, during a large trade show like CES, the LVCC will pay TBC $30,000 for every day it operates and manages the system

At a frankly embarrassing capacity too:

If the Loop can demonstrate moving 2,200 passengers an hour, TBC will get $4.4 million

• San Francisco’s BART moves about 3-4 million people per month(~ 5,000 per hour)
• Boston’s MBTA moves on average 700,000 to 800,000 people per week (~4,1000 per hour)
• And then there’s the NYC Metro 2-6 million people per day.

"Everybody laughed at Elon when he said he could do a thing! Now he does a completely easier, unrelated thing!"

Checkmate liberals?

It is hard to "solve traffic"...especially by selling more cars...but Elon made a profit in gimmick town by building a profit-seeking gimmick...so, take that, doubters! That's definitely what you said he couldn't do!

I'll be perfectly honest as a non-American who tries to not hear about Musk, I had no idea this was actually built.

I'd heard about it, but I didn't think they'd be stupid enough to actually build it.

Some people are "idea" guys, other guys are wealthy. When these are separate people, great things can come of it. When they are both the same person, stupid shit comes of it.

For anyone interested, that's the U4 line in Hamburg, Germany, at the "HafenCity Universität" station.

This is a 3.5km tunnel with a speed of 55km/h. Thats 3.8 minutes of travel. No fucking way this thing could ever be profitable.

For some reason Americans don't think trains are sexy. Mostly though there's a belief that they're extremely expensive, difficult to maintain, worse to use than cars, and too inflexible. The first two are more true about highways than railroads and the hyperloop is the worst of both worlds and really just the manifestation of Elon and many Americans' distaste for interacting with and as part of the public.

One is a grift, the other one is actually meant to be a means of transportation

Great, let's ravage the plan to have proper public transportation and turn it into glorified toll road.

TIL that money really is the only source of truth. Like bruh, that's just a complete nonsequestor.

A few years back I actually found the hyperloop pretty novel and cool. Like put your car on skates and it could zoooom very fast. Yes a train would be better but this idea seems like a cool project. Fast forward now, and you still have to drive and stuff, it's lame af.

The sad thing is, there's already a light rail there between the convention center and hotels.

Also if note, If they would have built a nice path, you could have easily just had people walk.

For a reference of scale, the largest high speed rail network in Europe is in Spain. Last year it moved some 33 million people (that's just high speed, not including local slow trains or urban metro) and, while overall revenue data is not widely available (there are multiple operators reporting independently), it generated several billion dollars.

If you want to scale that to what it would do in the US with a similar network you can add a zero to all the numbers and you won't be too far off.

We have a LRT here in toronto that has taken over a decade to build and MIGHT finally open in 2025. I am so sick and tired of transit projects being so slow.